Crane's strangeness has always kept his poetry from being justly appreciated. Whether or not it's understood, well...

Crane's poems have an interesting way of shifting meanings each time one comes back to them, over the very many years. In my raw youth Crane had a certain appeal to young poets who grasped, or imagined, the element of self parody. That there may also have been irony -- even sincerity -- maybe not grasped quite so well, then. Yet we were almost as young as he had been when he wrote them, so there's at least that not very good excuse. The critical sense of isolation and epiphenomenal dread and social disconnectedness in the poetry should not come as a great surprise. Impoverished almost always, sickly from childhood, forever having colds and never getting over them, yet testing himself to the extreme in so many circumstances.

At the same time his precocity with language is notable. His imitating his brother's handwriting at age 3, enquiring of his mother, "How do you spell 'O'?"

It is winter. We’re driving across the desert.Our bodies ache. We are this alive.His words are dust, sage, riding fence,and the explosion in the cook shack.There is nothing in particular but then

masses of sheep spring from his lips.An owl comes closeand the horse gets awaythat summer. He is sweatingand blurry

Slumped in the seatwith a sore neckas we pass the stockyard in Madras.

He’s talking about the landwhile the owl’s wings brush across his browand on a path in the mountainsa cougar visits him. Pure accidentthat he is alone and seeingwhat he’s seeing so up close.Now it is obvious that the cougar didn’t knowhow to be more in the bushes or more in the trees.His father showed him one oncestuffed in a basket on the porchagainst all regulations and nobody was supposed to touch.